Читать книгу Psychological Analysis - Adam Sarhan - Страница 23

I had saved some of the profits from my early businesses, and by high school, I had taken an interest in the stock market. I looked around and asked a lot of people: “What is the biggest business in the world?” What did the top 1% of people do with their money? Some invested in real estate, I discovered, but the most common answer always led me straight to Wall Street.

Back in the 1990s, the crash of 1987 was still fresh in people's minds. But the market and the economy were on fire, the flames fanned by dot‐com stocks and the rise of the internet. The U.S. economy seemed unstoppable. Cell phones were becoming widely used and telecommunications companies were hot. I consolidated my little horde of candy and fireworks money and bought my first stock: SprintPCS.

For a period of time, the stock did great, but then it collapsed, and I didn't sell it until it was too late. Years later, as fate would have it, my first “real” job during college was working for SprintPCS, selling cell phones at the now‐defunct Circuit City.

After my freshman year at Pace University in Manhattan, I transferred to Florida to escape the high cost of living in New York City. As luck would have it, and thanks to grace from above, that turned out to be a very good move because, back in New York, I would literally walk through the World Trade Center every morning to get to school. I transferred in the summer of 1999 and, had I stayed, I would have been there on 9/11.

To get by, I worked five days a week and I went to school five days a week. I tell people I work with (and my kids) that makes 10 days in a seven‐day week! At first, most people do not believe it, but for most of my 20s, I never had a weekend off, and that's what I did to get ahead.

One day, about a week after I moved to Florida, I was standing at the bank at 4:00 p.m. waiting for a friend to pick me up. The lobby had just closed, so I was forced to wait outside in the hot Florida sun (and I mean hot). A red Corvette pulled up and a beautiful lady hopped out.

“The lobby is closed,” I said.

“I know,” she said, but walked up anyway and knocked on the door. The door opened, she went inside for five minutes, and when she came out she asked me what I did for a living.

I told her I had just moved to Florida and I was studying political science. I asked her what she did and she said she was an executive at SprintPCS. I said, “Wow! What a small world. I own your stock.” She was not expecting that from some random kid waiting for a ride outside a bank. We talked for a little while, and then she asked if I wanted a job at the corporate office. I said sure, we met the following week, and she offered me a position: I was to help increase sales at Circuit City in South Florida. I worked there for the next few years, helped open the first Circuit City in Boca Raton (which later became Barnes & Noble), and my stores became the most profitable in South Florida.